Railway engineer moves high court to find ‘kidnapped’ son

Peeved with the alleged police inaction in finding his 12-year-old mentally challenged son — who was reportedly kidnapped by a drunkard near Pune railway station last month — a junior engineer with the railways moved the Bombay High Court on Thursday.

Peeved with the alleged police inaction in finding his 12-year-old mentally challenged son — who was reportedly kidnapped by a drunkard near Pune railway station last month — a junior engineer with the railways moved the Bombay High Court on Thursday.

Through his counsel Amit Kumar Bhowmik, Jitendra Singh is now trying to seek a state CID probe in the alleged kidnapping of his son, who Singh believes has been trapped by a drunkard from the begging cum prostitution racket functioning near the station precinct on November 26.

According to Singh’s petition, Pramod Kamble, the alleged kidnapper traced by him on the basis of the CCTV footage recorded inside Pune railway station, was let off by the police just a day after his arrest.

As per the CCTV footage, the boy entered the railway station at about 10.28 am on November 26. Half an hour later, Kamble was seen attempting a conversation with him. Barely minutes before Singh and his relatives could come looking for the boy, Kamble allegedly walked away with him.

The petition asserts that Kamble confessed to having taken the boy with him to Bund Garden police following which he claims to have forgotten what happened thereafter. Despite his confession, the police had done little to trace the missing boy, it adds. “The senior police inspector of Bund Garden police station did little to act on the complaint and was quite complacent about the terrible ordeal that the petitioner, his wife and other members of the family were undergoing,” the petition states.

Singh claimed “a begging / prostitution syndicate is functioning from Pune railway station by kidnapping waifs and runaways but the police are taking an ostrich like stance.”

Hence, Singh has sought further investigation by local crime branch or the state CID. The petition is likely to come up for hearing before a division bench of Justice VM Kanade and Justice Roshan Dalvi on Friday.